Archive for the ‘Business Intelligence’ Category
If you are evaluating reporting or analytics tools, or just like to mess about with them, it’s always good to get your hands on some “real world” data sets. It sure beats using the Steel Wheels, Classic Models, eFashion etc. sample databases typically shipped with the products. For a truly comprehensive list of free data […]
Sometimes it may be useful to know inside the report which servlet mapping is used to run the report (e.g. frameset, run, preview). var sMapping = reportContext.getHttpServletRequest.getRequestURI(); var nPos = sMapping.lastIndexOf( “/” ) + 1; this.text = sMapping.substring( nPos ); You can place the above code inside a label to see the servlet mapping.
BIRT 3.7, previously codenamed Indigo, was released on June 22. Here are the necessary links to find out more about this latest version: New and Notable for BIRT 3.7 Release BIRT 3.7.0 Download Page BIRT Project Plan
In an earlier post we discussed a generic way to dynamically get the list of report parameters at run time without having to hardcode the parameter names in the script. As was correctly pointed out in the comments, the code did not work for parameter groups (and also cascading parameters). However, it is possible to […]
On this blog we have often talked about overriding the default behaviour of the BIRT chart palette by dynamically setting colours based on data values. However, it is perhaps worth looking in more detail at the palette itself to understand the default behaviour and appreciate how it can be tweaked. Each chart has a palette. […]
In case you missed these, Innovent Solutions (one of the corporate backers of Eclipse BIRT project) published papers comparing Jasper and Pentaho to BIRT. Naturally, they conclude that BIRT is top of the pile in open source reporting, however they do justify this conclusion and the papers make an interesting read. BIRT versus Jasper BIRT […]
UPDATE: For an improved version of the code which works correctly with parameter groups and cascading parameters please see this updated post. Thank you to Stork for pointing out the problem with this code. The traditional way of accessing BIRT report parameters from script is through the expression ReportContext.getParameterValue( parameterName ). Naturally this method requires […]
The following expression will dynamically get the file name of the report: reportContext.getReportRunnable().getReportName(); Two points to note: The expression actually returns the full report URI rather than just the name, i.e. something like file:/C:/BIRT/Report01.rptdesign. The URI is percent-encoded and so space characters will be returned as %20 and so on for other special characters, e.g. […]
In what is rapidly becoming a mini-series, we have so far discussed how to set BIRT chart palette dynamically (based on category values) for pie charts and area charts. Today we cover stacked bar charts, i.e. bar charts with the Optional Grouping data element. Once again, let’s start with a quick recap. In what is […]
Series labels can be shown in BIRT area charts by opening the Chart Wizard and navigating to the Format Chart tab, then selecting Series > Value (Y) Series > Show Series Labels checkbox. The result will look as shown in the screenshot below: Often there is one particular grouping (series) which is especially important and […]